Robert Fiander

Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding by W. Terrence Gordon. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing, 1997, 465 pp.

W. Terrence Gordon's Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding, to its credit, fails to show us the absent-minded professor of the C.F. Bronfman Heritage vignette on television. Gordon, a Dalhousie University faculty member since 1972, does a thorough job in demolishing such slick misinformation aboutcanada's mediatheorist. In doing so, he brings an impressive background to bear on hi s subject. Gordon has written more than one hundred articles in linguistics, pedagogy, semiotics, and intellectual history. Among the twelve books he has published, is McLuhan for Beginners, which clearly illustrates, for non-specialists, McLuhan's approach to the study of media. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding traces the threads of Marshall McLuhan's life in relation to the developmentof his thought. The environmental influences of family, livelihood and education which are brought to the foreground in this biography help to erode the well-known (and uninformative) clich6s of McLuhan as a "media guru" and "Pop-culture oracle" (generic, mass-media titles which inaccurately suggest a quasi-religious worship of technology on McLuhan's part). In the process, Gordon lucidly explains the multifaceted significance of the notoriously misunderstood adage-"The medium is the message.

The chief merit of this book is its enlightening portrait of a thinker whose ideas on the psychological and societal effects of technology remain compelling, if not always influential or well received, eitherin the mind of the general public orby academic and literary intellectuals. Gordon uses the private papers of the McLuhan family, interviews with McLuhan's son Eric, his wife Corinne, and his brother Maurice, in order to provide an idea of McLuhan's personality and character as a grounding for his work on all forms of media. For instance, in an effort to gauge the impact of early family environment on the young McLuhan, Gordon often stresses the pioneering character of his forebears and the individualism of his parents. William McLuhan Jr., Marshall's great-grandfather, for instance, had little interest in the linen business in the Old world, and came to North America to test his resourcefulness, although an inveterate tendency toward dissoluteness posed problems for him. James Hilliard McLuhan, the grandfather, was a self-reliant man, one who bought two hundred acres of land in the southern Ontario heartland-after travelling sixty miles on foot. James, in addition to becoming a pillar of his community, was also a good dancer, as was his grandson. Interestingly, McLuhan's grandfather was also responsible for the launching of local telephone service in Luther, Ontario. James' wife Margaret, was devoted to the church: and her Catholic zeal would re-emerge in her grandson Marshall's conversion to the Catholic religion, and to his cryptic description of Christ's significance as the "ultimate extension of man" (Playboy Interview 1968). Herbert McLuhan (Marshall's father), in turn, became assistant manager for an insurance company, and Elsie Selden Hall, McLuhan's mother, was a talented thespian who gave solo dramatic performances across the country.

Family life for the young McLuhan was alternately pleasant and stormy. Herbert shared his son's intellectual curiosity and encouraged his literary explorations via chatting and mutual reading interests. Elsie, however, in spite of her artistic energy, frequently appeared less interested in her son's intellectual developmentthan in seeing him starthis own family. The diary entries used by Gordon show that Marshall's intellectual communion with his father trailed off after Herbert was demoted and lost the sense of motivation that his son thrived on. Elsie, however, was to continue to influence her son, personally andprofessionally. She introduced him to Corinne Lewis, whom he married, and Elsie's professional memorization techniques were to aid him as a student and a professor. Out of this mass of interesting biographical detail, Gordon's refrain tells of McLuhan's sense of having a mission that set him apart from others. Marshall's ability to dominate conversations, his alienation from the engineering students with whom he worked during the summer in Manitoba from 1929-33, his not-surprising shift from engineering to Arts as a result, and his precocious dissatisfaction with professors whose lectures failed to deal with the resonance and mystery of literature, all pointed to the young McLuhan's potential. Additional detail is offered about the romantic side of McLuhan's life. One of the young McLuhan's more interesting observations in this regard (at the time of his friendship with Marjorie Norris) is that his future partner must be "sincere and noble" (28), and that the charms of female company "diminish" with absence (29)-a sign of intellectual fervor which counter-balanced, for McLuhan, the environmental effects of society and biology.

In Gordon's account of his subject's educational influences, we see a McLuhan who is delighted, on the one hand, by Cambridge's more advanced examination styles, and who is appalled, on the other hand, by the faddishness of his new academic surroundings. At Cambridge, McLuhan was to discover Joyce, Eliot and Pound-artists whose work drew attention to thecultural malaiseof the twentieth century, and the importance of Symbolist art as anti-environment in a Western world which was losing its traditional sources of religious consolation. G.K. Chesterton, whose "social philosophy" McLuhan much admired (Escape 40)-was also an influence, as was Thomas Nashe, the subject of McLuhan's dissertation. Nashe's penchant for parodying sixteenth-century literary styles, and his refusal to operate solely within the tradition of Aristotelian end-logic pointed to the importance of language itself as allegory/analogy of the divine logos (102-113). Among McLuhan's influences after Cambridge werewyndham Lewis, who saw the technological urban environment as a collection of various "amputations" of the human body, and Harold Innis, whose Empire and Communication and Bias of Communication anticipated McLuhan's focus on media environments as agents of historical change. Gordon's commentaries on these authors, like his other biographical observations, always help to illustrate McLuhan's interest in academic/social/media environments as things to be understood rather than accepted somnambulistically.

McLuhan, contrary to the "media guru" clichd, was not exclusively concerned with electronic media technology, and his approach to contemporary issues was neither prescriptive ' nor emotionally sterile. Gordon's elucidation of McLuhan's work defends it against hostile reactions, past and present, as well as showing how ignorance of technology's influences involves subservience to the same. McLuhan's approach, as Gordon points out, was to look for the "hidden ground" of any and every issue he addressed. On the issue of abortion, for example, McLuhan abjured the use of the word "moral" as a cornerstone of debate in this area, in spite of being a Roan Catholic. Gordon:

 Abortion could be viewed as the figure
 against the ground of a larger issue 
 ... the discamate state of mankind under
 electronic technology [via telephone,
 television, radio].  Even if he took no
 moral stance on the matter the
 intellectual apparatus he was committed
 to made it impossible to treat abortion
 as a question unto itself and difficult
 to discuss in a dispassionate manner.
 (Escape 262)

McLuhan's interest in figure/ground relationships, so important to his views on media and social issues, was given its first cogent expression in The Mechanical Bride (1951) his compendium of aphoristic commentaries on 1940's advertising images. He saw newspaper and magazine advertising techniques as an unacknowledged source of propaganda-invisible "ground" or environment-which The Bride drew attention to as "figure"-Or object of attention. Thus, the issue of taste in advertising was less important than the sheer dominance of advertising as a controlling environment which needs understanding. Understanding, in turn, leads to better decisions in relation to environment-not a fatalistic embrace of the inevitable.

In a letter to Herbert Krugman in 1970, five years after Understanding Media had been published, McLuhan traced serious 20th-century interest in figure/ground relationships to F.C. Bartlett, whose discovery, as Gordon writes,

 that all perception is the
 re-structuring of any situation
 whatever led [I.A.] Richards and
 others [F.R. Leavis & William Empson]
 to test this on the printed page ...
 From week to week and year to year the
 same experiences are, according to
 Bartlett's recorded observations,
 undergoing perpetual change.
 (Escape 217)

Thus, the introduction of any new media/medium into the social/economic/ political environment involves a shift in what is regarded as "figure," or object of attention, and what is usually ignored as "ground" _or invisible, controlling environment. When the medium of radio wore off as a novelty, it ceased to be a "figure," and took its place as "ground"-while the former "ground" of newspaper now found itself a "figure," or less-dominant and thus more conspicuous medium, struggling to find ways to compete with radio, and to re-establish itself as ground. Similarly, when television was first introduced, it was a "figure," against the "ground" of cinema. When television became as unremarkable as eating breakfast, it became the new, controlling "ground," while cinema became its "figure"-or content. Sadly, once the novelty of McLuhan's phrase "The medium is the message" had worn off, it had done so without nearly enough people even being aware of what it meant. The famous McLuhan "probe" [or aphoristic attempt to stimulate curiosity about one's environment, technological and other] had shifted from "figure" of the 60's to the "ground" of the 70's, 80's, and 90's, while having had significantly less influence on society than the media it critiqued.

Gordon's examination of the reasons for this development entails careful explication of McLuhan's actual ideas-as opposed to the misconceptions that have developed around them. Thus, a brief synopsis may be helpful, by way of explaining Gordon's discussion of ideas about media in Escape (Many other, more extensive ones, exist-by Tom Wolfe, Howard Gossage & John Culkin, for example, in McLuhan: Hot & Cool). McLuhan's use of the word "media" includes all extensions of the human body-notjust mass media. From the fork and knife as extensions of hands and teeth, to clothing as extension of protective, heat-maintaining skin and hair, to numbers as extensions of the fingers and toes for counting, to language as extension of thought, to the phonetic alphabet as extension of the vocal chords and the spoken word-all of these are mediators of human experience, and changes in such "media" automatically entail changes in environment. When fork and knife replace gnawing on food with fingers, when clothing changes from loin-cloths to shirts and trousers, when people begin to count beyond six digits, when grunts turn into syntagmatic and paradigmatic combinations of words, and when the phonetic alphabet decontextualizes human experience by representing disembodied sounds via the uniformity and repeatability of the printing press, changes occur in ,the way we think and live. When people become aware that such environmental realities are inseparable from how we think and behave, then their questions about thought and behaviour make more sense and have more impact. Today, however, as in McLuhan's day, the conception of media as bodily extensions still faces the resistance of those who think of technology as a "neutral" phenomenon, firmly under the thumb of its users.

Gordon, as he deals with the widespread misinterpretations of McLuhan's saying, "The medium is the message," writes that

 Misunderstanding of the principle
 expressed by 'the medium is the
 message' has often arisen where
 readers and audiences failed to
 make the leap with McLuhan from
 media of communication to any
 technological extension of the
 human body.  This is surprising,
 in view of how infrequently he
 used mass communication as a
 starting point for discussion.
 (Escape 174)

McLuhan's principle is about how "all media remake mankind's perceptions and environment without undergoing any change themselves" (174). The stirrup (extension of the foot) transformed Medieval society by giving greater power to knights, who became able to fight on horseback, offering protection to the highest bidder-thus introducing a new power structure, as well as a new way to wage war. Even more significant as an environmental influence, however, was the adoption of the phonetic alphabet by ancient Greece and Rome, which, because it is easier to absorb than ideographic writing, made book knowledge available to people other than the learned elite who traditionally exercised social control through a monopoly on literacy skills. The invention of the printing press, in turn, not only was indispensable to the success of the Protestant Reformation, but also facilitated a social shift from tribalism (without a centre/margin scheme) to nationalism (with a centre/margin power structure).

As one might expect, then, Gordon frequently skirmishes with critics who denounce McLuhan's ideas. He acquits himself (and McLuhan) well. Among the critics he deals with are John Fekete, who argues that McLuhan is a technological detenminist; Umberto Eco, who disagrees with McLuhan's claim that the light bulb has a transforming effect on social organization; and Jonathan Miller, who disagrees with McLuhan's claims about the effects of the printed word and television as media. By way of refuting these critics, Gordon implies that much of the bad press about McLuhan is founded upon a straw-man version of his views. In simple terms, debate about McLuhan's ideas involves discussion on whether changes in media environment really make a substantial difference in human experience. Do people do what they do because they make a choice, or is the choice made for them by their surroundings? If there is an answer, it must be yes and no. McLuhan's questions about media, in effect, accept the paradox of experience, without irritably seeking final, fixed positions. In his own words, he is an explorer (McLuhan: Hot & Cool, 1969), not an oracle.

Claims like John Fekete's, Umberto Eco's and Jonathan Miller's tend to reinforce the illusion that humanity's environment/experience remains essentially the same, no matter what the technological innovation. Gordon lucidly answers Fekete's argument that McLuhan is a determinist who sees us as prisoners of technology, commenting that "In fact, McLuhan says that media effects come about inevitably, as a result of altered sense ratios, but not that we are powerless to deal with them" (302). Similarly, when Fekete points to how electricity has not unified the world into a global village, he once again reveals ignorance of McLuhan's actual estimation of electronic technology as a social force Electric innovations, that is, as extemalizations of our central nervous systems, re-create the conditions of immediacy and orality (Anyone you know is a phone-call away; find anything you need on the intemet; let T.V. foster the non-lineal, audile/tactile response to ideas and experience which characterizes oral cultures), and thus foster the tribal, but they also foster division and conflict (Have you ever been on a chat line where everyone was in agreement?). McLuhan does not "approve" of the global village. He points out that we live in it (303)-and when living in the global village, it is fatal not to understand that media are extensions of the body--extensions that condition and control us the less aware of them we are.

Gordon's grasp of McLuhan is equally convincing when he discusses Umberto Eco's objection to McLuhan's definition of the light bulb as a "medium" of pure information. Eco, the semiotician, correctly points out that a light bulb can be a signal, message or channel, and that McLuhan is wrong to give such technology the broad significance of "medium." McLuhan's point, however, as Gordon shows, is that the light bulb has a transforming effect on society-if only because more people than ever are able to work and play by night: the workplace and sports scene thus are irrevocably changed, as are people's attitudes towards both. Hence, McLuhan's view on the light-bulb as a "medium" which creates new environments is "undamaged" (326). Eco also attacks McLuhan's adage that media are metaphors for the environmental changes they create, arguing that media are "codes" and that metaphors are just "replacements within these codes" (327). Gordon responds: "It would be of no use to McLuhan ... to analyze [media] in terms of codes, when it is precisely the changes brought about by new media [and hence of any codes, semiotic or other] that he wishes to study" (329).

As he continues his investigation of how McLuhan has been misconstrued, Gordon also refutes Jonathan Miller's criticism that McLuhan's account of television's effect on the senses is purely metaphorical, and thus has no bearing on that medium's empirically measurable effect on the human body. McLuhan, however, when he says that television makes the eye assume the function of the hand, is referring to the high degree of "involvement" that television places on the eye-an involvement, as Gordon says, "as intense as that of touch" (328). This mesmerizing amplification of the eye as hand, far from being metaphorical, is empirically measurable: hence, the emergence, since the 50's, of the somnambulistic "couch potato," who exhibits, in DeKerkhove's words, a "sub-muscular response" to television (See Skin of Culture). Among Miller's other contentions is that speech has the same linear effect as the phonetic-alphabet medium of print, because sounds, like words on the page, can only be produced one at a time during the speech act. This claim supposedly erodes McLuhan's point that print differs from speech by inducing a lineal bias in the thought patterns of those who read. Gordon responds by pointingoutthat speech's "linearity" is only marginal compared to print's, whose linearity is "constantly forcing the eye to move from left to right [reinforcing left-hemisphere activity in the brain], from top to bottom, over visible figures against visible ground" (329). Speech- or direct and immediate, oral communication-stimulates the ear from all angles around the body, and diminishes the visual sense. It is thus legitimate to say that amplifying the visual sense via the uniform typography of the printed page alters the ratio of the other senses, with significant psychic effects.

Gordon's many clarifications of McLuhan's meaning, although illuminating, yet take something away from McLuhan's aphoristic, mosaic, and occasionally disruptive style. An epitome, for instance, of how McLuhan seeks to infiltrate his readers' sensibilities can be seen in The Medium is the Massage, in which a paragraph i s printed upside down. Many readers, after having turned their text upside-down to read the paragraph, will make the mistake of going to the next page without having set the book right side up- with the attendant effect of disorientation. Such a tactic is a bit like an annoying practical joke, and yet is an effective method of defeating the expectations of the lineal, step-by-step mind-frame induced by print. "The medium is the message" thus emerges in McLuhan's writing through booby-trap, as well as through probe and aphoristic arrangement of ideas. Information alone is not the sole strength of McLuhan's theories.

McLuhan's Laws of Media, for example, even though its title page suggests a closed, scientific system, is a book with no such approach. Gordon explains how McLuhan and his son, towards the end of McLuhan's career, formulated a tetrad of open-ended, verifiable questions which may shed light on different forms of media, without presenting all-embracing conclusions. The idea of the tetrad is to generate environmental knowledge and insight in an emerging form through questions rather than in a static form through conclusions. The questions consist of (1) What does any given media enhance/extend (2) What does it obsolesce (3) What does it reverse into when pushed to an extreme, and (4) What does it retrieve from the past? Thus, the stirrup enhances the user's weight and power, obsolesces the infantry, reverses into, when pushed to the limit, the tank, and retrieves the mythological centaur from antiquity. Far from closing down debate about media, the tetrad opens up the empirical and imaginative possibilities of new and old technologies. With this in mind, here is one version of how Escape into Understanding responds to a tetradic approach: (1) Escape enhances/extends Marshall McLuhan's image as a scholar, family man, and media explorer whose agenda is understanding-not prescriptive judgement (2) It obsolesces McLuhan as a trendy Pop Oracle whose theories are a threat to common sense and Western values (3)

Pushed to an extreme, Escape reverses into a portrait of McLuhan as one who foresees the loss of the values and achievements of Western civilization if the newelectronic environmentreplaces intelligence with Al, and reality with the "Virtual" version (4) Retrieved from the past is the McLuhan whose provocative style and cryptic probes are gaining attention once again -if only because technologies of all kinds remain problematic.

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